Night Vision TV

Night Vision TV is the result of a month long gamejam.

Night Vision TV is a Hitbox-based streaming experience. Watch Theo and Marty, two self-styled urban explorers, as they stumble into an underground military base and uncover more than they bargained for. The game takes the shape of a cooperative adventure game where players follow the game characters via a Hitbox.tv stream, and use twitter to guide the characters through the game.

Night Vision TV was made for the Something Awful GameDev Competition 2014. I was very lucky to end up in a team with 4 other very talented individuals, and i had an absolute blast as we spent the month of July working on the game. At the end of the month i had managed to put together a decent number of fairly distinct looking rooms as the team’s environment artist.

When Theo and Marty first enter the military base everything looks like it has been abandoned for quite a while. As the two explore further it becomes obvious that not only something weird has happened here, but is still happening as they are no longer able to find their way back to the exit. After improvising some repair work to the base’s generator things get weirder and Theo and Marty are shifted into the past.

This plot twist required the two distinct visual themes for each room, and i had a lot of fun contrasting the grimy, decayed look at the start of the game with the sterile lighting in the past versions of the various rooms. I somewhat misjudged the amount of content i would be able to create within the time-frame of the contest however, as i found it rather challenging to light my environments in a satisfactory way with Unity3D’s available tool set. And I wasn’t the only one in the team butting heads with Unity, as hooking up the environments to the game logic didn’t go quite as smooth as planned either. Unfortunate, but at the very least this resulted on us not wasting effort on things we didn’t have time to implement.

The game ends with Theo and Marty shutting of the device responsible for time and space going all wibbly wobbly and resetting the timeline (and thus conveniently resetting the game). The device in question took some obvious inspiration from another spherical device that messes with space and time, but when you are faced with an impending deadline originality is easily sacrificed. It also looks really cool.

Sadly, the technology for this game isn’t quite as robust as we hoped it would be, which means the experience is marred by lag or downtime every now and then. As the result of a month long gamejam however, i’d say we managed to create something that is pretty cool, if not quite perfect.

You can play Night Vision TV here, keep in mind that you will need a twitter account to interact with the game.